Noncompositional

Browsing through the website of the LSA, I noticed a series of pamphlets that answer some frequently asked questions. Some have been around for a while, like the Why Join the LSA? and Why Major in Linguistics? ones. But there are over a dozen more, all on good topics that everyone should read, to allow their lives to become more linguistically enriched. They’re short and well-written, and hint at the depth of research that supports the statements made in the pamphlets.

As a side note, what exactly is the semantics of frequently asked question? I know it appears in places where even the author admits that the questions answered are not frequently, if ever, asked, indicating that the literal meaning is still alive (otherwise why make disclaimers). But it could also just mean “questions that, if people felt like asking questions, would be common questions”. But if you look at the pamphlet titles, not all of them are questions, like Linguistics and National Security and Bilingualism. But I suppose that’s just semantics quibbling. [hmm...a new topic for a pamphlet? What is Semantics, really?]

One also might wonder who is frequently asked these questions. I’m sure linguists are (I’ve been asked six of them…outside of a classroom), including the people who wrote and commissioned the pamphlets. But how many has the LSA, as an institution, been asked? Of course, the website does not state that the LSA has been asked the questions per se, though I suppose the Why Join is reasonable.

A recent posting to slashdot talks about a conflict between the Mapuche people and Microsoft. It seems that the leadership of the Mapuche people are unhappy about Microsoft’s latest translation of Windows. From the CNN article:

But Mapuche tribal leaders have accused the U.S. company of violating their cultural and collective heritage by translating the software into Mapuzugun without their permission. They even sent a letter to Microsoft founder Bill Gates accusing his company of “intellectual piracy.” “We feel like Microsoft and the Chilean Education Ministry have overlooked us by deciding to set up a committee (to study the issue) without our consent, our participation and without the slightest consultation,” said Aucan Huilcaman, one of the Mapuche leaders behind the legal action. “This is not the right road to go down.”

Predictably, most of the slashdot crowd was dead set against the Mapuche position. Given that in that part of the web, the slogan “information wants to be free” is something of a mantra, the predominant view was that trying to regulate the usage of a (human) language was the most radical type of intellectual property stupidity. Some discussants on slashdot also mentioned (reasonably, I think) the fact that the Mapuche leadership hasn’t acted (publicly) against some other online dictionaries (though this may be because they were consulted in their creation). They are also working with Chilean leadership to help revitalize and increase use of the language — though among non-speakers of the Mapuche community, not of the larger national community. This also caused confusion among the slashdot crowd — wouldn’t a localized version of popular software do nothing but help the revitalization process? In the end, it’s unclear from the news article exactly what the tribe leaders want, from Microsoft in particular or from anyone in general, who wishes to do something related to their language. It has, of course, been studied by both South American and international scholars, and I don’t know what sort of agreement those scholars had with the people who they consulted with.

The question of who “owns” a language, as I have learned in my field methods class, a very important issue for linguists and other (ethnographical/anthrolopological/etc) fieldworkers who work with politically disenfranchised people. There are many stories of groups of native people who are distrustful of university researchers who, it is feared, want to go into the community, extract knowledge about the culture and language, and then retreat to the university to publish cultural information in obscure places (like, say, academic journals) in obscure ways (like, say, using the jargon of theoretical linguistics). For a community attempting to keep their language alive, it might seem foolish and/or insulting to invest time and effort so that that an outsider can learn their language/culture, only to give nothing back to the community while profiting from that knowledge. It may also seem like a slight against them that much or any of their cultural knowledge is now fodder for academic discussion. And for this reason, many communities (I have heard mostly about those in California, but it may well be true for many other American groups) work out very (sometimes legally) explicit deals with those linguists who they work with. And those linguists are often expected in turn to help the community in working with their language, if such help is desired (such as publishing accessible grammars and dictionaries, or training native linguists or teachers, or making recordings and texts publicly or tribe-internally available).

It’s hard for me to take a clear position on the Microsoft-Mapuche conflict, since the facts are about as clear as mud. Though in general I’m a fan of free information, that’s normally in the context of everyone involved having the same ideas about what can possibly count as “information,” and what sorts of things are potentially classifiable as “private.”

A recent entry into the growing field of linguification led me to do some thinking. There seems to be a subtype of linguification that has do to with, in a broad sense, collocations. That is, what sorts of words or parts of words can appear next to each other, in the same sentence, in the same paragraph, or document. Phrases like “word1 and word2 don’t belong in the same phrase/sentence/story” or “word1 rarely/often/always appears near word2″ are examples of these. This LL entry has a large summary of such stock phrases (some of which, however, are not about collocations, such as the “can’t spell x” variety).

There are some extensions: “You can’t mention word1 without also mentioning word2″ is also a slight variation of collocation pattern. Another, slightly less related sort of phrase is exemplified by something I heard on CNN the other day: “You can’t go one sentence without mentioning Barack Obama” [it proves itself!].

What it mean that people like to frame non-linguistic facts in terms of collocational “facts”? An initial hypothesis is this: people have a very naive folk theory about discourse. Namely, any given bit of discourse (from word up to document/conversation) is supposed to be on a single topic and is supposed to advance a single argument. Nothing that would potentially counter that argument (including entities that prototypically exhibit properties contrary/opposite to the topic*) can even be mentioned, let alone used to argue one’s point.

A potential sub-part of this theory (or perhaps just a corollary) is that discourses are saturated with positive epistemic stances. For instance, you do not argue X by saying (not A, not B, not C, not D, etc.). Similarly, a reason for X cannot be “not-A” (e.g., saying that you don’t like profession X because they do not have attribute A is not allowed, because you “rarely utter X and A in the same breath”). This may end up being a property of the linguification family of snowclones/constructions, and about the pragmatics of mentioning words (as opposed to using them), but it seems like a good working hypothesis.

(*From such a belief comes assertions like “‘linguistics’ and ‘practical’ don’t belong in the same/adjacent sentence/phrase/whatever”)

Though the jury is still out, I have been informed by a non-Californian (well, a deep-Southerner-turned-Californian) that I, in fact, do have several of the Great California Vowel Shift. Namely, the lowering and/or backing of front vowels before oral consonants. So I (apparently) don’t pronounce did like dead, but it’s (barely perceptibly) somewhere in between the two. I’ll have to surreptitiously record myself to find out, though I did notice that perhaps my low front vowel (the one in that) is usually laxer and further back than the “standard,” which is part of the perceived vowel shift.

And for something totally different, I present, for your viewing entertainment Stephen Pinker vs George Lakoff in a battle for American progressives’ hearts and minds.

Yesterday (and on rebroadcast today) linguist and Language Log contributor Geoff Nunberg appeared on the Colbert Report to talk about his new book Talking Left (see discussion on LL here and here). Comedy Central’s website has the majority of the interview, though they omit the funny intro where Colbert makes his way through the entire subtitle, and a few of the first questions, including the inevitable, so, what do you linguists do anyway?.

I’m not entirely sure how to characterize the interview. I have to say, it was not one of the most entertaining I’ve seen on the show. However, it was better than many; I generally find the celebrity interview portion the least entertaining, unless the celebrity isn’t afraid of bringing the heat. Geoff is more mild-mannered, so the dynamic was more one-sided, and thus less interesting to watch. Colbert did a great job of giving a mini-version of the pro-war cliche-fortified talking points, flourishing stay the course and support the troops in every other sentence. I’ve never seen Geoff hold office hours with an annoyingly persistant student, but I’ll venture to say that’s what it might be like.

Unable to think of original content, let’s consider the latest two The Good Word entries over at Slate.

The first, Suck it up (hat tip: Lindsay), is an essay on the verb suck in its meaning of ‘lame’…uh, I mean, ‘undesirable.’ Apparantly some people frown upon its use, because it’s vulgar/faddish/lewd/etc. Seth Stephenson argues against this position, and the basic point is one that any good student of semantic change (and sociolinguistics, which of course is a part of any curriculum on semantic change) could make: “You don’t like semantic change? Sucks to be you” (as the author puts it). The various arguments should be familiar: does the word evoke the supposed lewd act? (no, especially not in people who’ve never even heard of said act [though, a combination of the sort of linguistic stick-in-the-mud who doesn't like the word along with connectionist and/or exemplar-based models of the lexicon, I might be able to see how a snowball effect could result]); is the etymology of the word even related to fellatio? (origins are unclear, but other sources present themselves); can you change the trend? (no).

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In a previous post I discussed some activities of Japan’s national language research institute, which starting in 2003 started publishing lists of loan words in Japanese, most of them recent loans, that they felt should not be used in government and other popular documents (e.g., newspapers) because they contributed to a lack of comprehension on the part of the general public. Some typical examples of words taken wholesale from English into Japanese are informed consent, community, universal service, and soft landing (as in a slow economic quieting-down).

Over at LanguageLog, Mark Liberman wondered how borrowing a foreign word could lead to evasive language, as I had said. Indeed, many of the concepts that the institute singled out originated in various sectors of the American and/or European business and government world, and so no equivalent is immediately available in Japanese. It thus may seem natural to just take the foreign concept and stick it into your language unomi…uh, I mean…sans accommodation. Though this may be bad technique, surely it is not “evasive.” Or is it?

I admit (and this is hard, being a mini-lexicographer) that I did not mean to imply that such users of gairai-go were evasive or using ii-mawashi. In the case of government documents or in newspapers, the Kokken asserts that the use of gairai-go is due to writers putting priority their own ease of writing rather than their audience’s ease of understanding (外来語の使用状況を見ると，読み手の分かりやすさに対する配慮よりも，書き手の使いやすさを優先しているように見えます。). However, from the point of view of the reader the effect, I believe, may be a sort of evasiveness or equivocation [insert some word that means: 'You keep using that word. I do not think you know what it means']. Because many of these words are used without supplementary definitions in Japanese ([this would also alleviate the problem, I suppose]), those people without much exposure to English (and often, specifically business and government terminology) will be left thinking that the wool might have been pulled over their eyes. After all, if you’re not sure what the difference between サーベイランス surveillance and モニタリング monitoring is, you might be a bit confused if you receive a notice that local law enforcement will be stepping one of them up in your area (the latter is about making sure you don’t miss any changes in a situation, while the former is about making sure you don’t let anything evil/bad escape your attention). So while these two words, if understood by everyone in the conversation, could lend a good amount of precision to the discourse, for someone not familiar with the subtleties, it may as well be doublespeak.

Of course in the end, as with most things like the Kokken’s suggestions, it’s basically a moot point, since the Kokken really just makes suggestions to other government agencies (and newspapers, though I don’t think they have to follow the guidelines). The places where you see the most obvious use of katakana-go is in advertisements, television, and other popular media. In those places it has a sort of chic, or so I’m told. So as long as learning (some sort of) English is liu xing, uh, en vogue, there’s no expecting the use of gairai-go to decrease. Thankfully, the American government is well aware that English is superior to other languages, and so we need not fear our kooteki shorui being contaminated.

[edited to fix some markup and minor content]

The recent news that the national language-monitoring agency of Iran has put forth a long list of loan words that are to be replaced by native words or (sometimes newly-coined?) compounds. Posts from Language Log, Gwynn Dujardin, and Language Hat cover the issue, mostly amused at the attempt of a central regulatory agency to control the uncontrollable.

Back when I was in Japan in 2003-4, the National Institute for Japanese Langauge (国立国語研究所, or 国研 Kokken) released its second list of suggested rewordings of gairai-go (外来語言い換え提案), or loan words mostly from western languages. However, unlike the efforts of some other national bodies, Kokken (or rather, the Gairaigo committee) does not wish to purge the Japanese language of evil foreign influences (yet! mwa ha ha), but instead encourage understanding and discourage evasive language. They point out that often the use of gairaigo is more about increasing ease for the writer or speaker (who can just import a foreign concept without explaining it), as opposed to increasing understanding for the reader or listener. Their suggestions are also, well, suggestions, rather than written-in-stone law. Their documents in particular single out government-issued documents, newspapers, and other texts with a high level of exposure to the public. They don’t really care what people use in their own homes, but if people don’t understand what their government is saying, maybe something isn’t going right.

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